MY LIFE THROUGH MY T-SHIRT COLLECTION- THE PRESIDENT AND THE KING

Back in the early 1990’s before I had met Mrs. Postcard- for 3 years I went on long long vacations in the summer. The longest was a month in 1992. My brother and I had a goal to see a baseball game in every Major League Baseball park- we came close that summer but never met our goal but that was fine. We just didn’t want to see baseball games but with the both of us being history junkies- we wanted to see historical sites- and national parks etc along the way.

Early on in the vacation we stopped in Memphis and visited Sun Records, the American Civil Rights Museum where when it was the Lorraine Motel- Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. Well we were in Memphis and before we left town we had to visit The King at Graceland. I have a bad habit of when going to museums, historical sites of heading to the gift shop first. I had mentioned to my brother “Wouldn’t it be cool if they had a t-shirt of the picture of the meeting between Elvis and Nixon.” I asked the lady at the counter if they had a t-shirt of that and she acted like shocked “We would never carry a t-shirt like that” like it would somehow be insulting to the President of the US.

Later in the trip when we were in California- early one morning we headed down to the Nixon Presidential Library. We were early and standing outside I threw out the comment again to my brother about the t-shirt. We thought the odds were 100-1 against the Nixon museum carrying the t-shirt. We walk into the gift shop and there it was. So I had to buy a couple of them.

Elvis and The Tricky One met on December 21, 1970. Elvis had requested a meeting with Nixon to because he wanted to be a “Federal Agent at Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Agency. What a sad and tragic figures both men were. I agree with John Lennon- he was in Japan on a vacation when told that Elvis had died- his response “Elvis died when he went into the army.”